Activision Blizzard E3 Investor Event Coverage

Develop Magazine is offering up coverage of Activision Blizzard’s pre-E3 investor event, in which Blizzard co-founder Michael Morhaime pointed out just how successful World of Wracraft has been for the company.

Morhaime said that Blizzard is ‘uniquely positioned’ in the games market, specifically given its centrepiece place at online games, something which helps “set Blizzard apart in the games industry”.

Since being founded in 1991, Blizzard has grown from its three co-founders (including president Morhaime) to 3,500 employees. 750 of those are developers – the rest are support and management staff for its online service operation supporting its WarCraft, StarCraft and Diablo games.

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“There are really no shortcuts to developing a global playerbase,” he added.

Further proving his point, and raising a laugh from the audience, he offered up this stat: “During the last quarter, we had a total of 11.5m subscribers for World of Warcraft… by our estimation that’s 10 to 11m more than our nearest Western competitors.”